Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi co-founded and edited the English literary magazine Merlin in Paris from 1952 to 1954. Merlin was pivotal in publishing works by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre a.o. in English. After the magazine had folded, Trocchi got addicted to heroin and wrote a string of pornographic books for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press to sustain himself and feed his addiction. Young Adam, although spiced up with erotic scenes at the request of Girodias, is…
Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi co-founded and edited the English literary magazine Merlin in Paris from 1952 to 1954. Merlin was pivotal in publishing works by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre a.o. in English. After the magazine had folded, Trocchi got addicted to heroin and wrote a string of pornographic books for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press to sustain himself and feed his addiction. Young Adam, although spiced up with erotic scenes at the request of Girodias, is…
“By SACRED FIX I mean the fix on and with Madness – that sanctified condition when all has meaning and the madman is a poet living a poem. Apart from LEAR IN LOS ANGELES, I have enclosed ‘The Needle Vestal’, ‘The Rake’s New Progress’… all of which were written either in asylums or when I was under psychiatric supervision. Indeed these have been the conditions in which most of poetry has been written. In many ways the conditions of an asylum are ideal for a poet, for he is surrounded by other madmen subject to all kinds of poetic visions and hallucinations…